Charlotte Smith
Charlotte Turner Smith (4 May 1749 - 28 October 1806) was an English Romantic poet and novelist. She initiated a revival of the English sonnet, helped establish the conventions of Gothic fiction, and wrote political novels. Life Overview Smith was married at 15 to a West Indian merchant, who by a series of misfortunes and imprudences was reduced from affluence to poverty. She had in her youth shown considerable promise as a poetess, and in her misfortunes she was able to maintain herself and her family by her pen. In addition to a poem, Beachy Head, and sonnets, she wrote several novels of more than usual merit, including Emmeline (1788), and, her best work, The Old English Manor House.''John William Cousin, "Smith, Mrs. Charlotte," ''A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature. London: Dent / New York: Dutton, 1910, 347. Wikisource, Web, Mar. 2, 2018. She was born into a wealthy family and received a typical education for a woman during the late 18th century. However, her father's reckless spending forced her to marry early. In a marriage that she later described as prostitution, she was given by her father to the violent and profligate Benjamin Smith. Their marriage was deeply unhappy, although they had 12 children together. Charlotte joined Benjamin in debtor's prison, where she wrote her 1st book of poetry, Elegiac Sonnets. Its success allowed her to help pay for Benjamin's release. Benjamin's father attempted to leave money to Charlotte and her children upon his death, but legal technicalities prevented her from ever acquiring it. Charlotte eventually left Benjamin and began writing to support their children. Her's struggle to provide for her children and her frustrated attempts to gain legal protection as a woman provided themes for her poetry and novels; she included portraits of herself and her family in her novels as well as details about her life in her prefaces. Her early novels are exercises in aesthetic development, particularly of the Gothic and sentimentality. "The theme of her many sentimental and didactic novels was that of a badly married wife helped by a thoughtful sensible lover" (Smith's entry in British Authors Before 1800: A Biographical Dictionary Ed. Stanley Kunitz and Howard Haycraft. New York: H.W. Wilson, 1952. pg. 478.) Her later novels, including The Old Manor House, often considered her best, support the ideals of the French Revolution. Smith was a successful writer, publishing 10 novels, 3 books of poetry, 4 children's books, and other assorted works, over the course of her career. She always saw herself as a poet first and foremost, however, as poetry was considered the most exalted form of literature at the time. Smith's poetry and prose was praised by contemporaries such as Romantic poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge as well as novelist Walter Scott. After 1798, Smith's popularity waned and by 1803 she was destitute and ill — she could barely hold a pen. She had to sell her books to pay off her debts. In 1806, Smith died. Largely forgotten by the middle of the 19th century, her works have now been republished and she is recognized as an important Romantic writer. Youth Smith was born on 4 May 1749 in London and baptized on 12 June; she was the oldest child of well-to-do Nicholas Turner and Anna Towers. Her 2 younger siblings, Nicholas and Catherine Ann, were born within the next five years.Zimmerman Smith's childhood was shaped by her mother's early death (probably in giving birth to Catherine) and her father's reckless spending. After losing his wife, Nicholas Turner traveled and the children were raised by Lucy Towers, their maternal aunt (when exactly their father returned is unknown). At age 6, Charlotte went to school in Chichester and took drawing lessons from painter George Smith. 2 years later, she, her aunt, and her sister moved to London and she attended a girls school in Kensington where she learned dancing, drawing, music, and acting. She loved to read and wrote poems, which her father encouraged. She even submitted a few to the Lady's Magazine for publication, but they were not accepted. Marriage and first publication .]] Smith's father encountered financial difficulties upon his return to England and he was forced to sell some of the family's holdings and to marry the wealthy Henrietta Meriton in 1765. Smith entered society at the age of 12, leaving school and being tutored at home. On 23 February 1765, at the age of 15, she married Benjamin Smith, the son of Richard Smith, a wealthy West Indian merchant and a director of the East India Company; the proposal was accepted for her by her father. Forty years later, Smith condemned her father's action, which she wrote had turned her into a "legal prostitute".Blank. Smith's marriage was unhappy. She detested living in commercial Cheapside (the family later moved to Southgate and Tottenham) and argued with her in-laws, whom she believed were unrefined and uneducated. They, in turn, mocked her for spending time reading, writing, and drawing. Even worse, Benjamin proved to be violent, unfaithful, and profligate. Only her father-in-law, Richard, appreciated her writing abilities, although he wanted her to use them to further his business interests. Richard Smith owned plantations in Barbados and he and his second wife brought five slaves to England, who, along with their descendants, were included as part of the family property in his will. Although Charlotte Smith later argued against slavery in works such as The Old Manor House (1793) and "Beachy Head", she herself benefited from the income and slave labor of Richard Smith's plantations. In 1766, Charlotte and Benjamin had a son, Benjamin Berney (1767-1777), who died the next year just days after the birth of their second, . Between 1767 and 1785, the couple had 10 more children: William Towers (born 1768), Charlotte Mary (c. 1769), Braithwaite (1770), Nicholas Hankey (1771), Charles Dyer (1773), Anna Augusta (1774-1794), Lucy Eleanor (1776), Lionel (1778-1842), Harriet (c. 1782), and George (c.1785). Only 6 of Smith's children survived her. Smith assisted in the family business that her husband had abandoned by helping Richard Smith with his correspondence. She convinced Richard to set Benjamin up as a gentleman farmer in Hampshire and lived with him at Lys Farm from 1774 until 1783. Worried about Charlotte's future and that of his grandchildren and concerned that his son would continue his irresponsible ways, Richard Smith willed the majority of his property to Charlotte's children. However, because he had drawn up the will himself, the documents contained legal problems. The inheritance, originally worth nearly £36,000, was tied up in chancery after his death in 1776 for almost 40 years. Smith and her children saw little of it. In fact, Benjamin illegally spent at least a third of it. Benjamin ended up in King's Bench Prison in December 1783. Smith moved in with him and it was in this environment that she wrote and published her first work, Elegiac Sonnets (1784). Elegiac Sonnets achieved instant success, allowing Charlotte to pay for their release from prison. Smith's sonnets helped initiate a revival of the form and granted an aura of respectability to her later novels (poetry was considered the highest art form at the time). Smith revised Elegiac Poems several times over the years, eventually creating a 2-volume work. Novelist After Benjamin Smith was released from prison, the entire family moved to Dieppe, France to avoid further creditors. Charlotte returned to negotiate with them, but failed to come to an agreement. She went back to France and in 1784 began translating works from French into English. In 1787 she published The Romance of Real Life, consisting of translated selections from François Gayot de Pitaval's trials. She was forced to withdraw her other translation, Manon Lescaut, after it was argued that the work was immoral and plagiarized. In 1786, she published it anonymously. In 1785, the family returned to England and moved to Wollbeding House near Midhurst, Sussex. Smith's relationship with her husband did not improve and on 15 April 1787, after 22 years of marriage, she left him. She wrote that she might “have been contented to reside in the same house with him”, had not “his temper been so capricious and often so cruel” that her “life was not safe”.Qtd. in Blank. When Charlotte left Benjamin, she did not secure a legal agreement that would protect her profits—he would have access to them under English primogeniture laws. Smith knew that her children's future rested on a successful settlement of the lawsuit over her father-in-law's will, therefore she made every effort to earn enough money to fund the suit and retain the family's genteel status. Smith claimed the position of gentlewoman, signing herself "Charlotte Smith of Bignor Park" on the title page of Elegiac Sonnets. All of her works were published under her own name, "a daring decision" for a woman at the time. Her success as a poet allowed her to make this choice. Throughout her career, Smith identified herself as a poet. Although she published far more prose than poetry and her novels brought her more money and fame, she believed poetry would bring her respectability. As Sarah Zimmerman explains in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, "She prized her verse for the role it gave her as a private woman whose sorrows were submitted only reluctantly to the public." After separating from her husband, Smith moved to a town near Chichester and decided to write novels, as they would make her more money than poetry. Her debut novel, Emmeline (1788), was a success, selling 1500 copies within months. She wrote 9 more novels in the next 10 years: Ethelinde (1789), Celestina (1791), Desmond (1792), The Old Manor House (1793), The Wanderings of Warwick (1794), The Banished Man (1794), Montalbert (1795), Marchmont (1796), and The Young Philosopher (1798). Smith began her career as a novelist during the 1780s at a time when women's fiction was expected to focus on romance and to foreground "a chaste and flawless heroine subjected to repeated melodramatic distresses until reinstated in society by the virtuous hero". Although Smith's novels employed this structure, they also incorporated political commentary, particularly support of the French Revolution, through the voices of male characters. At times, she challenged the typical romance plot by including "narratives of female desire" or "tales of females suffering despotism". Smith's novels contributed to the development of Gothic fiction and the novel of sensibility. Smith's experiences prompted her to argue for legal reforms that would grant women more rights, making the case for these reforms through her novels. Smith's stories showed the "legal, economic, and sexual exploitation" of women by marriage and property laws. Initially readers were swayed by her arguments and writers such as William Cowper patronized her. However, as the years passed, readers became exhausted by Smith's stories of struggle and inequality. Public opinion shifted towards the view of poet Anna Seward, who argued that Smith was "vain" and "indelicate" for exposing her husband to "public contempt". Smith moved frequently due to financial concerns and declining health. During the last 20 years of her life, she lived in: Chichester, Brighton, Storrington, Bath, Exmouth, Weymouth, Oxford, London, Frant, and Elstead. She eventually settled at Tilford, Surrey. Smith became involved with English radicals while she was living in Brighton from 1791 to 1793. Like them, she supported the French Revolution and its republican principles. As a successful novelist and poet, Smith communicated with famous artists and thinkers of the day, including musician Charles Burney (father of Frances Burney), poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, scientist and poet Erasmus Darwin, lawyer and radical Thomas Erskine, novelist Mary Hays, playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and poet Robert Southey. A wide array of periodicals reviewed her works, including the Anti-Jacobin Review, the Analytical Review, the British Critic, The Critical Review, the European Magazine, the Gentleman's Magazine, the Monthly Magazine, and the Universal Magazine. Smith earned the most money between 1787 and 1798, after which she was no longer as popular; several reasons have been suggested for the public's declining interest in Smith, including "a corresponding erosion of the quality of her work after so many years of literary labour, an eventual waning of readerly interest as she published, on average, a work a year for 22 years, and a controversy that attached to her public profile" as she wrote about the French revolution. Both radical and conservative periodicals criticized her novels about the revolution. Her insistence on pursuing the lawsuit over Richard Smith's inheritance lost her several patrons. Also, her increasingly blunt prefaces made her less appealing to the public. In order to continue earning money, Smith began writing in less politically charged genres. She published a collection of tales, Letters of a Solitary Wanderer (1801–02) and the play What Is She? (1799, attributed). Her most successful new foray was into children's literature: Rural Walks (1795), Rambles Farther (1796), Minor Morals (1798), and Conversations Introducing Poetry (1804). She also wrote 2 volumes of a history of England (1806) and A Natural History of Birds (1807, posthumous). She also returned to writing poetry and Beachy Head and Other Poems (1807) was published posthumously. Publishers did not pay as much for these works, however, and by 1803, Smith was poverty-stricken. She could barely afford food and had no coal. She even sold her beloved library of 500 books in order to pay off debts, but feared being sent to jail for the remaining £20. Illness and death Smith complained of gout for many years (it was probably rheumatoid arthritis), which made it increasingly difficult and painful for her to write. By the end of her life, it had almost paralyzed her. She wrote to a friend that she was "literally vegetating, for I have very little locomotive powers beyond those that appertain to a cauliflower". On 23 February 1806, her husband died in a debtors' prison and Smith finally received some of the money he owed her, but she was too ill to do anything with it. She died a few months later, on 28 October 1806, at Tilford, and was buried at Stoke Church, Stoke Park, near Guildford. The lawsuit over her father-in-law's estate was settled 7 years later, on 22 April 1813, more than 36 years after Richard Smith's death. Writing Smith's novels are autobiographical. While a common device at the time, Antje Blank writes in The Literary Encyclopedia, "few exploited fiction's potential of self-representation with such determination as Smith". For example, Mr. and Mrs. Stafford in Emmeline are portraits of Charlotte and Benjamin. The prefaces to Smith's novels told the story of her own struggles, including the deaths of several of her children. According to Zimmerman, "Smith mourned most publicly for her daughter Anna Augusta, who married an émigré...and died aged 20 in 1795." Smith's prefaces positioned her as both a suffering sentimental heroine as well as a vocal critic of the laws that kept her and her children in poverty. Her epistolary novel Desmond tells the story of a man who journeys to revolutionary France, is convinced of the rightness of the revolution, and contends that England should be reformed as well. The novel was published in June 1792, a year before France and England went to war and before the Reign of Terror (which shocked the British public, turning them against the revolutionaries). Like many radicals, Smith criticized the French, but she still endorsed the original ideals of the revolution. In order to support her family, Smith had to sell her works, thus she was eventually forced to, as Blank explains, "tone down the radicalism that had characterised the authorial voice in Desmond and adopt more oblique techniques to express her libertarian ideals". She therefore set her next novel, The Old Manor House (1793), during the American Revolutionary War, which allowed her to discuss democratic reform without directly addressing the French situation. The Old Manor House is "frequently deemed Smith's best" novel for its sentimental themes and development of minor characters. Novelist Walter Scott labeled it as such and poet and critic Anna Laetitia Barbauld chose it for her anthology of The British Novelists (1810). Stuart Curran, the editor of Smith's poems, has written that Smith is "the first poet in England whom in retrospect we would call Romantic".Curran, xix. She helped shape the "patterns of thought and conventions of style" for the period. Romantic poet William Wordsworth was the most affected by her works. He said of Smith in the 1830s that she was "a lady to whom English verse is under greater obligations than are likely to be either acknowledged or remembered".Qtd. in Zimmerman. By the second half of the 19th century, Smith was largely forgotten. In her last novel, The Young Philosopher (1798), Smith wrote a final piece of "outspoken radical fiction". Smith's protagonist leaves Britain for America, as there is no hope for a reform in Britain. Smith's novels were republished again at the end of the 20th century, and "critics interested in the period's women poets and prose writers, the Gothic novel, the historical novel, the social problem novel, and post-colonial studies" have argued for her significance as a writer. They looked to the contemporary documentation of her importance, discovering that she helped to revitalize the English sonnet, a fact recognized by Coleridge and others. Scott wrote that she "preserves in her landscapes the truth and precision of a painter" and poet and Barbauld claimed that Smith was the first to include sustained natural description in novels. Recognition In 2008 Smith's entire prose collection became available to the general public, when published by Pickering & Chatto. This edition (containing each novel, the children's stories, and rural walks) was edited by Smith expert Stuart Curran, and was published within 6 months of Pickering & Chatto's collections of essays upon the works of Charlotte Smith, edited by Jacqueline Labbe. Publications Poetry *''Elegiac Sonnets, and other poems. 3rd edition, London: Printed for J. Dodsley / H. Gardner / J. Bew, 1786. *The Emigrants: A poem in two books. London: Printed for T. Cadell, 1793. *Beachy Head; with other poems. London: privately published, 1807. *''Poems (edited by Stuart Curran). London: Oxford University Press, 1993. Play *''What Is She?: A comedy, in five acts, as performed at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden. London: Printed for T.N. Longman & O. Rees, 1799. Novels *''Emmeline; or, The orphan of the castle. (4 volumes, London : printed for T. Cadell, in the Strand, 1789. Volume I, Volume II, Volume III, Volume IV * [http://books.google.com/books?id=JK8BAAAAQAAJ Ethelinde; or, The recluse of the lake]. (5 volumes), London: T. Cadell, 1789. * Celestina: A novel. (4 volumes), Dublin: R. Cross / P. Wogan / P. Byrne / et al, 1791. Volume I, Volume II, Volume II, Volume IV * Desmond: A novel (3 volumes), London: G.G.J. & J. Robinson 1792. Volume I, Volume II, Volume III * The Old Manor House. (4 volumes), London: J. Bell, 1793. Volume I, Volume II, Volume III, Volume IV * Wanderings of Warwick (1794) * The Banished Man: A novel (4 volumes), London: T. Cadell, jun. & W. Davies, 1794. *''Montalbert: A novel''. (3 volumes), London: S. Low, for E. Booker, 1795; London: S. Low, 1796. Volume I, Volume II, Volume III * [http://books.google.com/books?id=BK8BAAAAQAAJ Marchmont: A novel] (4 volumes), London: Sampson Low, 1796. * [http://books.google.com/books?id=o-UkAAAAMAAJ The Young Philosopher: A novel]. (4 volumes), London : printed for T. Cadell, jun. & W. Davies, in the Strand, 1798. *''The Republican's Mistress: A novel founded upon facts''. (3 volumes), London: Wright, 1821. Volume I, Volume II, Volume III Short fiction *''Letters of a Solitary Wanderer: Containing narratives of various description''. (3 volumes), London: Sampson Low, 1800. Volume I, Volume II, Volume III Juvenile * Rural Walks, in Dialogues: Intended for the use of young persons. (2 volumes), London : printed by A. Strahan for T. Cadell jun. and W. Davies, Strand, 1800. * Rambles Farther: A continuation of Rural Walks, in dialogues: Intended for the use of young persons. London: printed for T. Cadell jun. & W. Davies, (successors to Mr. Cadell) in the Strand, 1796. * Minor Morals: Interspersed with sketches of natural history, historical anecdotes, and original stories. London: Sampson Low, 1798; Dublin printed by H. Colbert, 1800. * Conversations Introducing Poetry. 1819. Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.Charlotte Turner Smith, WorldCat, OCLC Online Computer Library Center Inc. Web, Aug. 9, 2015. See also * List of British poets References * Blank, Antje. "Charlotte Smith" (subscription only). The Literary Encyclopedia. 23 June 2003. Retrieved 6 February 2009. * Curran, Stuart. "Introduction". The Poems of Charlotte Smith. Women Writers in English 1350-1850. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. ISBN 019508358X. * Fry, Carrol Lee. Charlotte Smith. New York: Twayne, 1996. ISBN 0805770461. * Hoeveler, Diane Long. Gothic Feminism: The Professionalization of Gender from Charlotte Smith to the Brontes. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998. ISBN 0271033614. * Klekar, Cynthia. “The Obligations of Form: Social Practice in Charlotte Smith’s Emmeline.” Philological Quarterly 86, no. 3 (2007): 269-89. * Labbe, Jacqueline M. Charlotte Smith: romanticism, poetry, and the culture of gender. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003. ISBN 0719060044. * Zimmerman, Sarah M. "Charlotte Smith" (subscription only). Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press. October 2007. Retrieved 8 February 2009. Notes External links ;Poems *"Written at the close of Spring" *Smith, Charlotte(1749-1806) at Representative Poetry Online ("Huge Vapours Brood above the Clifted Shore)" *Charlotte Smith 1749-1806 at the Poetry Foundation *Charlotte Smith (1749-1806) info & 6 poems at English Poetry, 1579-1830 *Charlotte Smith at PoemHunter (126 poems) *Charlotte Smith at Poetry Nook (223 poems) ;Books *Selected works of Smith at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln *[http://books.google.com/books?id=QKsBAAAAQAAJ Emmeline (1789, third edition), Vol. 1], Vol. 2 Vol. 3, and Vol. 4 at Google Books *[http://books.google.com/books?id=KdwkAAAAMAAJ Celestina (1791, second edition), Vol. 1], Vol. 2, Vol. 3, and Vol.4 at Google Books ;Audio / video *Chrlotte Smith at The Poetry Archive *Charlotte Smith poems at YouTube *http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyEh0sHvQ-Y http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNPg_Z52Hc0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7Jv2XY0VZ0 Jacqueline Labbe (Warwick University) talks about the life and works of Charlotte Turner Smith ;About *Charlotte Smith in the Encyclopædia Britannica. *Smith, Charlotte in the Dictionary of National Biography Original article is at Charlotte Smith. Category:1749 births Category:1806 deaths Category:English poets Category:English novelists Category:Women novelists Category:Romanticism Category:18th-century women writers Category:English women writers Category:Romantic women writers Category:Women poets Category:18th-century poets Category:Poets Category:Sonneteers Category:English-language poets